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Shoebox Full of Photos: Beyond Digital Storage

#sxsw #shoebox

Do you remember when you cracked open that shoebox full of snapshots in your grandmother's attic and discovered a past generation? Will your grandchildren be able to have the same experience? Will they be able to log in and dig up your Facebook albums? Will they be able to boot up your old iPhone? Hundreds of thousands of photographs are uploaded to online services every day with little consideration for the temporal nature of everything we put in the cloud. If Kodak decides to stop making film, the photographs in your closet will remain, but the same is not true if Facebook decides to shutter its photo business. And while a tattered photograph continues to tell a story, a corrupted hard drive or a hacked account can destroy a lifetime of photos in an instant. Is a shoebox full of photographs simply nostalgia, or is it more? Are the images we take just for us, or do we have a responsibility to leave behind more than just a pile of bits for future generations to discover?

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Presenters

Jesse Chan-NorrisCo-FounderIndaba Music

Jesse is a ruby developer who spends most of his time making sites that live on the web. At various points in his career he has also been a photographer, a theatrical lighting designer and a management consultant. He is the co-founder of Indaba Music, a trustee of the New York chapter of the Awesome Foundation, CTO of the Institute on Higher Awesome Studies, co-creator of imood.com (online since 1999!) and an organizer of the Gotham Ruby Conference. He is a fan of cycling and tea.